The Third Wife

Seen at the Theatre Royal, Castlemaine

Cecil says: Nice to get time on a lazy Sunday to go to our local cinema the Theatre Royal in Castlemaine. The Third Wife has that slow, sensuous pace that can make me drift off to sleep, though, especially on a lazy Sunday, and I think I did momentarily drop off a couple of times through the film.

Set in 19^th century Vietnam, this is a closely observed social commentary on the lives of women at the time. We focus mainly on May, the 14 year old who is married to a man who already has two other wives, and she goes on a journey of self-discovery and into womanhood while still enjoying playing with the younger daughters of one of the other wives.

We don’t really know anything of the husband and he only appears occasionally, to make love with one or other of his wives or to try to broker a deal over the marriage of his wayward son (to the first wife).

But we don’t need to know really. This is a film about women, their relationships between themselves and their tentative forays into letting their own passions surface.

Slow-paced it certainly is, with long periods of no sound track at all, but close-up camera angles on the intimacies and banality of every day life. We watch a chicken being bled to death slowly, we see May fainting while she gives birth very painfully; there are long slow pourings of tea into cups and water into trays; and the old grandfather appears now and then, seemingly a gentler soul than the husband, though I didn’t quite get the symbolism of his clothing, or his wisdoms, or indeed whether he might have been blind…

But there is a definite message that being a woman in this kind of world is not something to be yearned for, and indeed one of the younger girls says rather pointedly that when she grows up she wants to be a man… which links in possibly to the very last scene of the film, but I won’t do a spoiler for that, and I may be misreading her final actions…

***

Bea says: I have been interesting in Asian cinema since that run of cross-over successes in the 1990s (Raise the Red Lantern etc).  The beautiful cinematography combined with the slow pace is more reminiscent of reading a novel than watching a film for me.  It's the perfect genre for a Sunday afternoon.

I enjoyed this film as a visual experience - it's visually stunning, and I enjoyed seeing women's lives documented, although their lives of servitude (either as servants or as daughters and wives) were very difficult indeed.

***.5